News and notes from and for the Mozilla community.

A note from Mitchell Baker about the Summit

In just under a month approximately 2000 Mozillians will gather for our Summit 2013. We’ll gather to celebrate, to get to know each other, and to do some very important work.

The works focus of the 2013 Mozilla Summit – through a small handful of keynotes, interactive fairs and sessions designed by Mozillians – is to develop a shared understanding of who we are as Mozilla, what we’re trying to accomplish, and how we go about doing so.

At its heart, Mozilla is a community of people who share a common purpose: promoting the traits that have made the internet so powerful, flexible and innovative to date. These traits, such as openness, freedom to innovate, interoperability, decentralized decision-making and user control, represent both who we are and a key strategic asset in developing market relevance and impact. We’ll use the Summit to develop shared understanding about these traits, how to use them practically and how to meld our values with the practical realities of online life today.

Mozilla builds products and programs that bring these values to life. At the core of this is the idea of each individual having as much control over their online life as possible. We started with the web platform itself and the browser, and we’ve expanded to the phone. User control also extends to the data that makes up our online lives, to apps and content, and to our understanding of how the digital world we live in works. We’ll use the Summit to develop alignment about what we’re building today, promising directions for the future and the external environment that defines both opportunities and challenges.

By the end of the Summit we will have looked at these values and the future of our products together. We will have built new relationships by digging in practically, solving problems and making plans. We will have a clearer idea of our product strategy and how it moves our mission forward. We will leave stronger as a community with a clearer picture of the world we want to build.

Expect a lot of fun, long days filled with questions, explorations and problem -solving, getting to knowing a lot more Mozillians and returning home with new tools for moving Mozilla’s mission forward. And also expect to get your hands dirty helping to run the Summit — it will only work if we all pitch in to make it the event it needs to be. I’m looking forward to it.